Judging Freedom - Is Putin in Control... or Unstable? ROUNDTABLE w/ Larry Johnson & Ray McGovern

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

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What is this all about? And one of those emails was from you. So Gonzalo Lira, he was a podcaster. He was noted for doing a roundtable. He always would assemble experts to talk about Ukraine. He is a dual citizen, U.S. and Chilean. Born in Chile, became a U.S. citizen, but living in Ukraine, living in Kharkov. And he was detained briefly last year by the sbu the ukrainian

intelligence police and then released and he was arrested uh about nine weeks ago and had disappeared nobody had heard a thing from him until he resurfaced publicly yesterday. I actually heard from him about five days ago. And he was trying to figure a way out of Ukraine. Why did the Ukrainian police arrest him? They didn't like the concept of freedom of speech. He was not threatening Ukraine. He would have experts on. For example, he had Ray and I on together to

talk about the situation in Ukraine. Wait a minute, isn't it, Ray, isn't Ukraine a democracy and don't they respect the freedom of speech? That's what the New York Times says, but you know, I have problems with the New York Times. Yeah. All right. What happened to him? Is he still in jail or did he get out? He got out on July 6th, but his passports were not given back to him, nor his driver's license. That was apparently returned sometime last week. So he put up these three videos yesterday announcing that he was going to try to cross the border into Hungary. I'm not sure if that's the truth I know he's trying to get out that may be a diversion putting that out in public and so he can go a different direction uh nobody has heard from him since then uh so there is still some concern that uh something uh bad happened to. But to appreciate what he was,

he was a much less handsome version of you, Judge Napolitano. Okay? He would do roundtables. He would encourage discussions. He would offer opinions. But he never made threats, and he never disclosed Ukrainian military secrets. He wouldn't hold the camera outside and say, hey, look where these Ukrainians are based.

Nothing like that. He just, he did what you do. Hosted discussions, asked questions. Well, I wish him well, and I appreciate all the emails that I received, of course, from you, but also from many other people whom I don't know who thought that I should know about him. And when I saw that you were in there, I thought I would ask you about it. So, Ray, lately, the MI6, the CIA, some German leaders, certainly the State Department, and we know the president in his own inimitable way, have all been mouthing almost verbatim the same line.

Putin has lost the war. A, is this a concerted effort? And B, how do they think they're going to affect public opinion with a statement for which there is zero evidence to support it? I suppose, Judge, they think they can get away with this for a while longer, but that won't be the case over the next two months or so. They're trying to say, as Jonathan Turley, the famous lawyer, says, nothing to this. Look away. There's nothing here, nothing here to look at. But there is a lot here to look at. And what I've been asking myself is, are these people delirious? Are they really unaware that Russia has not lost the war? I asked again a psychiatrist friend of mine. What did he say? He said, you know, it's the emperor's new clothes, right? It's the emperor's new clothes.

There's such an inadequate education in thinking logically, on the one hand, and such horror at the horror to face if we confront the truth, that as a result, people aren't thinking about whether they really need to protect their children and grandchildren, and they don't know it. That's what I had asked this fellow. Don't these people, many of them have children, some of them have grandchildren, don't they care about this? And that's the answer I get. They're sort of delusionary. And there's an interesting little thing I'll throw into the mix here. Biden was up in New England, Maine, over the weekend, and he participated in this little

gathering. And one of the people that writes about these things was there. And here's what she said. Biden referred to Madeleine Albright's dictum that the United States is the essential nation. Actually, she said it was the indispensable nation, which, of course, makes all other nations dispensable. Dispensable. Yeah, okay. So here's where she goes on. She says, now, here's quoting Biden. Who could possibly bring the world together? Biden asked.

Not me, humble Joe, but the President of the United States can. Who could do it unless the President of the United States does it? Who? What nation could do it? And she comments, his vision reaches back to the 1940s, to the post-war institutions that helped to rebuild Europe and create lasting alliances. She's a professor, but she's a very big Democrat. So, I mean, what better word from the top guy that he's out of touch with reality, okay? The United States can't do it. As a matter of fact, the United States policy is doing just the opposite, dividing the world, and it's going to come to a no good end, as the Chinese used to say in their more primitive propaganda. Larry, doesn't the intelligence community,

doesn't the State Department, doesn't the permanent parts of the government, the parts that never change, no matter who's in the White House and who controls Congress, don't they all believe that the United States is the indispensable nation? And haven't they deluded themselves into thinking we're spreading democracy, whereas we're spreading violence and death and terror and destruction? Well, there certainly is no evidence that anybody in the intelligence community has been inspired to step up and do an objective analysis about the consequences of U.S. actions. For example, when you impose sanctions on a country, you would think at some point some president would have asked the CIA, have sanctions ever worked? Can we point to one example in the last hundred years in which the imposition of economic sanctions have produced a positive outcome for us? And the answer would have been no, not one. Sanctions started World War II in the Pacific. The sanctions on Japan at the time contributed to that war. And Cuba, Russia, China, Iran.

So the sanctions instead end up blowing back on us. You could even argue that Woodrow Wilson's reparations after World War I were a form of sanctions that brought about Nazism and World War II. Yeah, it certainly helped promote political instability in Germany and the fall of the Weimar Republic. So what we're looking at is this U.S.-centric view of the world has gotten us into a lot of trouble because there has been the tendency to see the United States. It goes back to Ronald Reagan quoting Isaiah,

talking about the United States being a city on a hill, a light to the world. And that'd be one thing if we were genuinely teaching people about peace, teaching people to do things that were productive, to improve the lives of their citizens. But the U.S. efforts, particularly over the last 40 years, have been involved with causing death and destruction around the world, not bringing life. Ray, all those people in the White House or the West Wing, I'm not sure where you met them, that you briefed on a daily basis, were they interested in spreading democracy or interested in using military force as a means to spread American influence?

They were interested in stemming communism. And they believed that everyone who was Russian, for example, even Mikhail Gorbachev, that he was just a clever commie. And it was a monmouth task to dissuade them, to show them evidence. Look, the front page of Pravda is printing articles terribly critical of the Communist Party in this or that part of Russia.

The open glasnost and the perestroika, where they're changing everything, that's real. He's not just a clever commie. You can deal with him. So that was their obsession. Nicaragua? My God, there must be a Russian under every rock in Nicaragua. There were no Russians under any rocks.

There were no Russian planes or fighters there either. So Larry knows that story better than I do. Cuba was not a threat, but this was the mindset. And it took a lot of ingenuity for Secretary Shultz, and I give him complete credit for this, for facing into this and for things like that film I mentioned last time, just yesterday, The Day After. Okay. Was that the one? Yeah, the day after, which showed Reagan what happens the day after a nuclear weapon is used. Those things brought Ronald Reagan, staunch Cold Warrior as he was, around to think, well,

you know, the least harm, the least we can do is make sure that the worst doesn't happen. Did Reagan buy the nonsense that America is the indispensable country? You know, that's when Clinton came in. Now, of course, we had before Clinton, we had George Bush and the ideologues, some of them the neocons, who said, look, we are the unilateral power in the world, okay? And the defense planning guidance of 1991 said, we have to make sure that nobody rivals us, okay? As soon as they rival us, we have to cut them down. That's what it said in so many words. That was 1991. We could go in and destroy that Iraqi army, such as it was, and we did. Okay. That was 1991. What happens? in Kiev, but 2015, Putin pulls Biden aside and said, by the way, we're not going to let you have your insurgents, the good ones, take over Damascus. We're going to support Bashar al-Assad.

Why? Because he asked us to. That turned it. No longer could the U.S. exert supremacy over everything, and the Russians faced us down there. We lost. Bashar al-Assad's still there, and we're not very long for this world, those thousand or so troops that we have up there stealing the oil in the northern part of Syria. So long story short, we thought we were exceptional. We knew we were in 1991. After that, when Putin came into power 10 years after, and he started rebuilding the Soviet, the Russian economy, and the Russian military services

reached out to the West and said, hey, we're happy to join NATO if you'd like. And they said, are you kidding me? How are we going to sell arms if you're part of NATO? We need an enemy, please. Be patient and be an enemy. It's really kind of a sad story, but Americans are not aware of this. Americans think that it all started when Putin seized Crimea. They don't know the history of how the coup happened and how it caused that and how eventually the threatening of Russian strategic weaponry right on the border there, what John Mearsheimer calls the bulwark against Russia that NATO was building, had to fall. And that had to fall because Putin finally concluded that there's no way talking to these people. We have to go in and take care of our countrymen in the Donbass and then get rid of the Nazis and destroy the army. And they're well on their way to achieving

all those objectives. Larry, when we come back, I'm going to ask you why the Americans, the American deep state, the American elites hate Putin. And Ray, I'm going to ask you if then General, now Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, actually fudged intelligence information that the intelligence analyst gave him right after this. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Lear Capital. You know that I believe that that government is best which governs least, and that government is worst which interferes the most. There's no better example of this than government printing money. It decreases the value of everything you own, and it raises the prices on everything you buy. against this kind of governmental interference is physical, unprincipled gold. Your savings and your retirement should be filled with gold. Gold has a long history of protecting wealth against economic uncertainties and government interference. Learn more by calling Lear Capital.

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It's time to consider gold. It's time to consider Lear. 800-511-4620 or learjudgenap.com. Don't the people that run the government understand the economic prosperity that has come about in Russia since the presidency of Vladimir Putin? And don't they understand his moral compulsion to defend himself from the radical encroachments of NATO? And why do they hate him? Larry. So the hatred doesn't start off immediately.

You know, when Putin comes into office and in 2001 starts cracking down on the oligarchs. And remember, those oligarchs in Russia were partnered up with oligarchs in America. So there were American business corporate interests and individual interests who were hoping to reap lots, you know, billions of dollars out of Russia. Putin just stopped that. when he starts to push back on this concept of incorporating Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, that is where you can go back and search year by year the press coverage. That's where the worm starts to turn. Let me just stop you. And it doesn't matter which party is controlling Congress or who the president is. This attitude is the same for the war slash big government slash national security state party that has been running the government since 1940.

Correct. So the final break came with the Sochi Olympics. It coincided not only with a lot of attention on the anti-LGBTQ views of Russia, but on top of that, as Ray noted, Russia's intervention on behalf of President Bashar Assad in Syria to counter what was a U.S.-British effort to fund Islamic radicals, some of the very terrorist groups we claimed that we'd been fighting the previous 12 years, now we were arming, and those arms were coming out of a place called Benghazi in Libya. And as soon as Putin intervened to save the government of Syria, to save the Syrian army,

that's where the thing turned 180 degrees. It was full on hate putin putin is weak putin is sick the same the same messages we're hearing today they started launching those and that culminated with the coup and the maidan and the the taking down a president that was seen as too favorable to russia and installing a president that was going to be subservient to the West. Ray, talk to me about the use of Ukraine as a battering ram by the State Department, and talk to me about General, then General Lloyd Austin, fudging Intel. Is that true? Well, if you're asking me if it's true that he fudged Intel, yes, that's true. As a matter of fact, he never stopped. You know, his sole qualification seemed to be, well, among other things, that he went to mass with Biden's son. That doesn't do it for me.

Most generals and a lot of colonels don't think Austin is really up to it. That doesn't matter. Does he have integrity? That matters. When he was head of CENTCOM in Tampa, they were trying to run this insurgency against Bashar al-Assad. And they were picturing the evidence and saying, oh, these insurgents, they're really terrific. Let's give them another billion dollars.

Lots of money sent in there, okay? And the analysts down at CENTCOM in Tampa working for CENTCOM for General Austin were saying, that's BS. This guy's out of a prayer. You guys are just in there to help Israel. We know that story. And you're distorting the information we give you, and you're giving that to the White House. Stop it. Now, what happened? The journalist said, pipe down,

mind your place. And more than 50 analysts in CENTCOM made a formal complaint to the Inspector General of the Pentagon. Look, we do our best to serve up objective intelligence. It's laundered. It's pressutized. It's changed at the top. We're not going to work here anymore if we have to do this. A lot of these people are actually active duty military people. What happens?

Well, they appoint some brigadier general to investigate the four-star general, right? And it's a whitewash. Right? So the inspector general says, well, we looked into it and we're proud that you feel so strongly, but we don't, you know, well, I've never seen, I've never seen 50 or 30 or 20 people complain to the official inspector general of the Pentagon about their intelligence being doctored. But that happened. Now, would you think that somebody would have told Biden that before Biden said, oh, I'd like you to be the guy to tell me what's going on in Iraq?

Not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not Syria. Ukraine. I mean, hello, you have an example here. You have a record. And yet, has he been telling the president that Ukrainians are going to win, that Russia has lost. Larry, are you surprised that the documents that Jack Teixeira is accused of alone having released, the accuracy and authenticity of which the government has yet to challenge, show that senior American military leadership believes that Ukraine will lose, and yet at the same time, the Secretary of Defense,

the same person we're talking about, Lloyd Austin, testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee under oath, Ukraine is winning the war. Does any of this surprise you? Is this standard operating procedure for government in America? No, and we're in a better position today. If you go back and look, when those documents were first released, some were raising questions about both their authenticity and their accuracy. Well, now with the passage of time, we know that both they were authentic and accurate. They accurately projected some of the information that was present and circulating within the intelligence community with respect to Ukraine.

And the selection to put out what was going on in Ukraine, I believe and still believe, was a deliberate effort by some senior intelligence folks who used Jack Teixeira as a tool. They were able to sort of salt the account, get the information out there, and then widely publicize it. So we've seen that Ukraine, they projected that Ukraine's air defense system would be gone, non-existent by the end of March. Well, that was the case. And to this day, one of the reasons that the Ukrainians are failing in their counteroffensive is they have no combat air that can provide close air support

to troops on the ground so the the information teixeira put out was accurate and i believe it was put out with a for a purpose that there's maybe 30 percent within the intelligence community are horrified by what this war is going to do to us and our position in the world. And they're trying to get the word out that, you know, things are not in the rosy scenario being painted by Biden, Blinken, Austin, Mellie. Last question, Ray. Is Vladimir Putin as stable in office today as popular a president of Russia as he was before the war started? far as i can see the answer is yes now the caveat here is this fellow pre-goshen uh the way putin has handled that given pre-goshen's great great popularity in russia has in my view been rather artful. Prokofiev even showed up at this big to-do they had with the leaders this past few days.

So he's been co-opted. I think he's been pretty much made harmless. But the caveat there is that he does represent, in my my view a view that one would expect in these circumstances there are generals and there are people saying vladimir vladimirovich why did you get this damn thing over you got the forces to do it for god's sake knock that little twerp out in in in kiev and go ahead forward you know So I think he does have that to contend with. And I do think now, as I look on the Prigozhin affair, that this was part of it, that this was indeed Prigozhin thinking that these people who hold that view might have come to help him rather than salute to Shoigu and Putin when push came to shove. You asked a little while ago

about reaction in Germany and France to what's going on. Did you want to get into that now, Judge? Judge Kahneman Sure. Go ahead, Ray. Well, I had just enough time to quiz some German friends who are very, very well read. And I got this first email which says, Ray, it's a slap on the wrist. Don't generalize about Germans, please. Sounds condescending coming from an American. OK. Many Germans think we did it. Sounds condescending coming from an American. Okay. Many Germans think we did it, Nord Stream explosion.

Okay. When it's mentioned that the UN wouldn't even investigate it, the pipeline incident, many were outraged. Okay. And there's a big, broad spectrum of people who feel that way, not only in the left and the peace camp, but otherwise. Now, here's the interesting thing. The Alternative für Deutschland, the AFD, which has become all of a sudden the second major party. She says this. I believe that this may also be the predominant view of the rapidly growing Alternative to Deutschland.

In fact, I think the AFT is growing fast precisely because they entertain and express criticism of the U.S., which is popular at the grassroots and which outraged German leaders acting like U.S. puppy dogs. Isn't that interesting? Finally, she says, perhaps some very pro-NATO folks here, they even believe that Russia did it, even though this makes no sense. Let me add just one thing. I was at the dermatologist surgeon.

He was peeling off my thing, and he says, all right, good to see you again. So it looks like the Ukrainians blew up that pipeline, huh? He's a very, very well-read guy. Your American dermatologist said this to you. Yeah, he says to me, it looks like Ukrainians finally did it. I said, that's BS, except I used the whole words. And he looked at me, because you don't usually say that to a doctor, right? I said, what do you mean?

I said, well, you know, hey, look. I had showed him a picture of me at the UN. And I said, look what it says there. Seymour Hersh. Read that for Pete's sake. He's the guy. He's got the story. Don't worry.

Larry, Chancellor Scholz, does he have much longer in office, the German chancellor? I think he'll be lucky to survive through the end of the spring because when winter hits, Germany is going to suffer far more than it did this last go-round. So it's going to erode his base. Gentlemen, a pleasure. Thank you for adjusting your time. Thanks for coming on together. Thank you for having us. Of course. You'll see both Ray and Larry next week in their usual slots. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for Judging Free. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

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